To respond to these cranks, you can go into the number crunching that proves the case – or, if you live in Kalamazoo, Mich., you can plug in your EV at Western Michigan University.

image via The Green Panel

A 50-kilowatt solay array went online on campus this year, and now 15 EV charging stations are drawing power from the sun.

Two-hundred sixteen Mage Solar modules – from Georgia, by the way – are mounted onto 18 poles in a parking lot across from the university’s James W. Miller Auditorium. Coulomb Technologies supplied the 15 level 2 chargers, which are part of the ChargePoint Network the company is building with help from the U.S. Department of Energy.

And this is nifty: Whereas Web-based power displays are common for solar installations, we’ve never seen a Web-based EV charging station consumption display – until now. Check it out. You can see that in May, the array produced 5,246 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, of which 1,139 kWh went directly to power vehicles. For the year, as of yesterday afternoon the array had produced 22.4 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy, with just under quarter of that electricity – 5.25 MWh – used by the EV chargers.

Don’t worry about the power that doesn’t feed the chargers; the system is grid-tied, so it doesn’t go to waste.

The Clean Energy Coalition (CEC), a nonprofit funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and other state and private entities, provided the university a grant to help install the charging stations. It was Harold Glasser, executive director for campus sustainability at Western Michigan, who wrote the grant proposal that bagged the cash.